1. Field of the Invention
The invention is directed to television advertisements. Specifically, the invention is directed to reporting viewership of television advertisements and programs.
2. Background of the Invention
Audience Measurement Systems (AMS) should record all events generated by a consumer device, sends them to a centralized location, and allows interested parties to generate reports on all viewed content units, including channel, program, advertisements, etc. Audience Behavior Measurement Systems (BMS) should allow for the recording and monitoring of an audience's interaction with virtually any device or system, including household appliances, radio, TV, gaming consoles, smart phones, tablets, PCs, and so forth.
Due to the amount of data that needs to be collected, transported, stored, retrieved, and processed, the capabilities of existing cost-effective systems can be easily exceeded if the systems are used to generate reports on each and every content unit (program, ad, interactive TV applications, video-on-demand content, etc.) with no margin of error while allowing the user to look back and generate any type of report based on historical data. For example, the PayTV industry in the U.S.A has 60 million digital TV subscribers, where each subscriber generates, on average, approximately one hundred events per day. An Audience Measurement System with such capabilities would need to generate, transport, and store approximately 6 billion events to generate a report on every subscriber. To generate a program or ad rating report, such a system, for each report, will have to process 6 billion records per day of data. Moreover, considering that a typical linear channel lineup in the U.S.A is approximately 300 channels, and each hour of a broadcasted programming has up to 22 minutes allocated for ad spots (which are typically 30 seconds or less), there are up to 316,800 ad units per day which need to be mapped to about 1,000 socioeconomic, demographic, purchasing, housing, and other profiles. Such an amount of data currently makes creation of such systems impractical.
To date, no AMS have been created for the PayTV industry with the abovementioned capabilities, within a reasonable budget, because they have not overcome the limitations caused by the set-top-box return path (i.e. the set-top-box's upstream bandwidth to the head-end), the speed of data retrieval from centralized storage, the cost of CPU data processing to generate the necessary reports, and the time necessary to complete the requested reports (with 316,800 ad units, six billion US records per user per day, and 0.01 millisecond per one comparison, report generation can take up to 602 years to process on a modern computer).
Existing systems (for example, the one described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,983,478 entitled Method and System For Tracking Network Use) propose to create event timelines for each panel participant in a Parse and Merge Data engine by decoding and parsing data received from each panel participant's set-top-box, merging event records data with programming and ad data, and forming even timeline records for each of panel participant's set-top-boxes
Such a design and listed operations present two problems. The first challenge is that the systems require substantial amount of processing power to perform parsing, and a substantial amount of I/O (read and write) operations to create and store timeline records. This requirement dramatically limits the ability to cost-effectively scale, to provide support panels with reasonable number of panel participants, and to accurately represent viewing patterns of a requested targeting profile.
A second problem associated with the abovementioned approach creates timeline data records which are very large by their nature. Considering that the final product of this process is analytics report(s), and to generate such report analytics system has to run database queries over very large number of records, and each report generation consumes a substantial amount of time and computing resources.